Best Seller Is a Fake, Professor Asserts

By FELICIA R. LEE

Published: October 4, 1991

"The Education of Little Tree," a best seller that is supposed to be a memoir about the childhood of an American Indian boy reared in the Tennessee mountains, is a hoax concocted by an author who was a Ku Klux Klan member and anti-Semite, a history professor says.

The professor, Dan T. Carter, who teaches Southern history at Emory University in Atlanta, says he found information that led him to that conclusion while researching a biography of former Gov. George C. Wallace of Alabama. Professor Carter said the book's author, Forrest Carter, was really Asa Earl Carter, a violent white supremacist and the author of some of Mr. Wallace's most famous speeches, including the 1963 inaugural speech in he which he vowed: "Segregation now! Segregation tomorrow! Segregation forever!"

"This guru of new-age environmentalists was actually a gun-toting racist," Professor Carter said Asa Carter, who he said had the same great-great-great-great-grandfather as he did. The charge that Forrest Carter, who died of a heart attack in Abilene, Tex., in 1979, was Asa Carter is not new. But Professor Carter, who is planning to write about his findings, said, "I have absolutely positive documentary proof" which he said he would give in detail later.

In an article that appears today on the Op-Ed page of The New York Times, Professor Carter states, "The carefully constructed mask of Forrest Carter -- Cherokee cowboy, self-taught writer and spokesman for the American Indian -- was simply the last fantasy of a man who re-invented himself again and again in the 30 years preceding his 1979 death."

"The Education of Little Tree," now No. 1 on the New York Times paperback best-seller list for nonfiction and the winner of the Abby Award from the American Booksellers Association, has sold more than 500,000 copies and has been hailed by critics as a lyrical tale.

The book, written as the autobiography of the half-Cherokee Little Tree, orphaned at the age of 10, tells of learning the ways of Indians from his grandparents in eastern Cherokee country in Tennessee. In interviews, Forrest Carter told reporters that he had never spent more than six months in a formal classroom and that he had led a peripatetic life as an adult of wandering between ranch jobs until he found success as a writer.

First published by Delacorte Press in 1976 and reissued in paperback by the University of New Mexico Press in 1986, the book's popularity slowly soared, and it rose to the top of the best-seller lists this summer mostly through word of mouth.

Eleanor Friede, an independent producer and agent who published two of Forrest Carter's books, yesterday dismissed Professor Carter's claims as the resurrection of a nasty rumor that first surfaced in the mid-1970's after Forrest Carter's first novel was made into the film "The Outlaw Josey Wales" starring Clint Eastwood.

"It's the same old story," Ms. Friede said. "Forrest denied it when he was alive; his family has denied it. Anyone who wrote 'Little Tree' could not have worked for George Wallace.

In an article that appeared in The New York Times on Aug. 26, 1976, Forrest Carter denied that he was Asa Carter but declined to be interviewed further on the subject. Others interviewed for the article said they knew for a fact that Forrest Carter was really Asa Carter, a former executive secretary of the Northern Alabama White Citizens Council. They noted that the two men were the same age, had the same address, and looked the same in photographs and in television appearances.

"It was clear that this was a man who, except for his own accounts, didn't exist before 1976," Professor Carter said yesterday. He said that he was unable to trace anyone listed in an family geneology published in the supposed autobiography and that on a trip to Tennessee hill country he did not meet anyone who knew Little Tree or the grandparents who reared him.